


An unverifiable account of how Yusuf al-Kaysani introduced what is now known as pasta to what is now known as Italy, as bullshitted (possibly) to Nile Freeman (by Fall Out Boy)

by itsrottenvibes



Series: TOG fic I wrote after taking sleep meds [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Cooking, Domestic, Family, Food, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, Humor, Lingua Franca | Sabir, M/M, POV Nile Freeman, Pasta, Slice of Life, Trope Subversion, Unreliable Narrator, trolling as a love language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:12:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26210155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsrottenvibes/pseuds/itsrottenvibes
Summary: “I always thought this would be the opposite way around,” Nile blurted out. “Nicky cooking Italian food, andyouoglinghim.”“Nile, this may come as a surprise, but our Nicky here can’t cook Italian food,” Joe whispered conspiratorially, eyes gleaming. “He thinks pesto genovese is modern hippie nonsense.”“What? I thought you’d be, like, an Italian food snob.”“I refuse to recognize the unification of Italy,” Nicky deadpanned.How Yusuf introduced pasta to Italy.Maybe.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: TOG fic I wrote after taking sleep meds [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1902475
Comments: 79
Kudos: 490





	1. Chapter 1

Nile was still getting used to life with the other immortals. From their selective knowledge of pop culture (she had once jokingly asked Andy, “If you’re from Asia, why are you white?”, to which Nicky had given a very earnest explanation of how not only were the Scythians nomadic, Andy actually predated their culture, and theirs was merely the last she could remember, while Andy had stared off into the distance, eyes glazed and unfocused), to their frequent name-dropping of historical figures and events (“I was afraid he could only see me as Othello, but Will told me I’d be perfect as Mercutio.” “Was Nicky Benvolio?” “He’d wished! No. . . Friar Lawrence!”), she’d mostly taken things in stride.  
  
Nile wasn’t quite ready to call them family yet. She already had a father (may he rest in peace) and mother and brother. She figured she’d check in on them from afar from time to time (really, she could have gone back to her mother and brother and explained away her lack of visible aging with the age-old adage, “Black don’t crack,” for two more decades at least).

Or maybe, Nile supposed, she had to rethink her idea of family. They _were_ her family now, in a way, not by choice, but out of necessity. Andy, Joe, and Nicky weren’t her new parents or siblings, they were three other adults, albeit much older, who protected, respected, and cared for her and each other. They were bound forever by their shared secret and trauma. And she trusted them with her life.

However, that trust didn’t always extend to the stories they told about their experiences, which ranged from the verifiable (“They stole our flag. . . and also everything from everyone”) to the extremely suspect (“We inadvertently introduced coffee to Italy, and to the rest of Europe”).

* * *

After they were settled in their newest safehouse, Nile accompanied Andy to a pharmacy for, Andy had begrudgingly admitted (baby steps), much needed help in purchasing first-aid supplies, while Joe and Nicky had headed for the open air market. Nile and Andy got back earlier, and were relaxing in the living room when Joe and Nicky returned. 

Joe entered the studio with a great flourish, as if in a stroke of inspiration, and announced that pasta was on the menu. Nicky followed behind him, having offered to carry the bulk of the groceries.

“Hear, hear,” Andy had wholeheartedly agreed from where she was lying on her stomach on the couch, eating leftover takeout with mismatched chopsticks.

“You’re in for dinner and a show,” Nicky had promised Nile. “It’s a whole enterprise!”

They walked over to the kitchen/dining area and started unloading and putting away the groceries. Nile was surprised when they took out mangoes, paper baskets of black cherries, yellow and white peaches, pomegranates, large bell-shaped satsumas, and bunches of fresh herbs from their reusable bags. Was this overkill? This was overkill.

It was certainly a far cry from the MREs she’d suffered through. She’d expected, at the very least, non-perishables. By the time they were finished unloading, Nile saw at least ten types of vegetables, fresh (!) beans, eggs, and a large bottle of extra virgin olive oil, among other things.

“I expected more canned beans and rice. This looks like the contents of an entire fruit stall right before 007 rams it with an Aston Martin.”

“We do keep non-perishables at all our safehouses. We just like to indulge when we’re not working. What’s the point of eating every day if we don’t take pleasure in it?” Joe’s eyes gleamed as they often did when he was passionate about something. “Sure, we can starve to death and come back, and we have! Hundreds of times when there were people in greater need. We live simply, but have enough saved for emergencies and new safehouses, and the rest of our accumulated wealth goes to charity.”

“Plus, Andy likes it,” Nicky added quietly.

“I can hear you!” Andy called from across the room, without malice. They all took extra care to balance protecting Andy with not making her feel coddled, but, Nile gathered, she gladly accepted special treatment if it meant she got delicious food out of it. “They’re also each other’s greatest enabler.”

* * *

That night, Nile watched mesmerized as Joe measured the flour by eye, formed it into a well on the counter, and added two eggs (“An egg and a _yolk_ ,” he’d corrected) into the center before breaking the yolks and stirring the eggs into the flour with his fingers, pulling up more flour to maintain the shape of the well and incorporating the egg and flour until a shaggy pale yellow dough formed. He scraped up the dough and kneaded it, forming it into a ball and covering it with a damp towel to let it rest, and then sat down to let himself rest. Nicky, she’d noted, had been perched on the dining table the whole time, only looking up from his book to watch Joe’s arms appreciatively as he kneaded.

“I always thought this would be the opposite way around,” Nile blurted out. “Nicky cooking Italian food, and _you_ ogling _him._ ”  
  
“I would _never_ ,” Joe gasped in faux outrage.  
  
“Yes, you would,” Nicky retorted. (Though Nile thought about it, and she realized that apart from the held glances and wordless communication, they rarely displayed their affection in front of others. Sometimes, they could be in the same room and never make eye contact. Out of regard for their own privacy, professionalism, and consideration, she guessed, for Booker who’d lost all of his loved ones to death, and for Andy, who’d lost the same, plus her lover to a fate far worse. And maybe immortals nearly a millennium into a relationship didn’t need to be all over each other all the time, especially because time apart didn’t feel as long.)  
  
“Nile, this may come as a surprise, but our Nicky here can’t cook Italian food,” Joe whispered conspiratorially, eyes gleaming. “He thinks pesto genovese is modern hippie nonsense.”

“What? I thought you’d be, like, an Italian food snob.”

“I refuse to recognize the unification of Italy,” Nicky deadpanned.

“You’re messing with me, _right?_ ” Nile exclaimed. “ _RIGHT?!_ ”

To Nile’s surprise, Nicky winked at her.

“It’s true!” Joe replied fondly. “Had we not crossed swords at Jerusalem, Nicolò here may have never tried pasta.”

“ _You_ showed _him_ pasta?” Nile asked incredulously.

“ _Habibi_ , you are too modest,” Nicky chided. “Had we not crossed swords at Jerusalem, it’s possible that _Italy_ may have never tried pasta.”

“Oh, _come on!_ Now I _know_ you’re fucking with me.”

“Of course not. Joe first made pasta for me in Palermo, though pasta was called _itriyya_ back then. By the mid-50s”—Nile raised a brow—“ _11_ 50s, it was exported from Sicilia to all the surrounding states, even back to some of the same ones it came from.”

“Wait, I thought Marco Polo visited China and tried noodles there?”  
  
“We pre-date him by, what, two hundred years?” Nicky replied. It was true. Nicky, Nile had learned, was born in 1069 (“ _Nice_ ,” Andy had added half-heartedly in Booker’s absence).  
  
“All part of a fictitious and, I might add, _racist_ marketing ploy, I’m afraid,” Joe said. He and Nile gave each other The Look and Nile nodded knowingly.

“Marco Polo actually compared Chinese noodles to pasta and described them as equally good, I believe,” Nicky continued, seemingly unaware of the exchange.

“Let me guess, you knew _him_ too?”

“Oh, _absolutely_ not! He was a _Venetian!_ ”  
  
“The Venetian-Genoese wars were happening at the time,” Joe supplied helpfully.

“Okay. So how _did_ you manage to bring pasta to Italy?”

“Where should we start? At our first, well. . .” Joe looked at Nicky, who gave a pained smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Nile had wanted to pipe in with “meet ugly” but felt it was inappropriate. She knew how to read a room.

“Start with the first time you made Nicky pasta,” Nile prompted quickly.


	2. Chapter 2

As the pasta dough rested, Joe and Nicky sat down at the small table talking to Nile.  
  
“I grew up eating _itriyya_ back home in the Maghreb,” Joe started, then turned pointedly toward Nicky. “Because I am Maghrebhi, Amazigh specificially, not Arab. Or, god forbid, _Sa_ —"

“Please, Yusuf,” Nicky said softly, blushing. Joe picked up Nicky’s hand and kissed him on the palm.  
  
“I know, _franco malvagio_ ,” Joe replied fondly. Nicky turned their hands over and kissed the back of the hand holding his. “But where was I? The earliest mention of _itriyya_ was in a 9th medical text written by a Jewish doctor living in what is now Tunisia.”  
  
Nile started to connect the dots in her mind.  
  
“ _Itriyya_ comes from the Greek word _itrion_ , a variation of the word _intrion_ , which I think was some sort of fried honey sesame biscuit.” He looked at Nicky. “ _Pasteli_.”  
  
Nile didn’t know Ancient or Modern Greek yet, but _The Iliad_ had been required reading in high school, and _intrion_ sounded like something she may have learned and immediately forgotten a decade ago.  
  
“Joe first made _itriyya_ for me when we were living in Sicilia. Palermo was no Constantinople or Valletta, but we called it home for quite a while. Back then, we were never able to set down roots for very long because so few places were safe for the both of us. Nearly everywhere we went, _evitata Charybdi in Scyllam incidi_.”  
  
Nile didn’t know Latin yet either, but _The Odyssey_ had also been required reading in high school (bafflingly, a year earlier). Out of Charybdis and into Scylla. Frying pan, fire. She didn’t think CPS would teach her anything useful, but she stood corrected. Thank you, Ms. Bolton.

“He made it for us for the first time two or three weeks after Midsummer, Saint John’s Day one year.”  
  
Nile did the math in her head. Midsummer was the last week of June, so. . .   
  
“Was it your. . . anniversary?”  
  
“Yes,” they both replied.  
  
“Of your first deaths.”  
  
“Of our first _meeting_ ,” Joe insisted.  
  
“That sounds very romantic and also very horrifying.”  
  
“It _was!_ Could you imagine our _breath?_ All that _garlic!_ ” Joe stage-whispered.  
  
“At least it wasn’t _garum_ ,” Nicky joked feebly. Joe shuddered.  
  
Nile tried picturing them in billowing white shirts, in their honeymoon phase, still grappling with their newfound immortality and their mutual feelings and their trauma, but then she realized she had no idea what people wore in the 12th century. Nonetheless, with no other reference, she continued imagining them wearing what were probably 18th century garments. She thought about how such specifics may be lost to time, and how such details were misinterpreted by even though who studied them, and how she felt as an immortal, living history she know would be lost to the collective memory, and how the only people who knew wouldn’t be believed and, sworn to secrecy, couldn’t tell anyway, and made a note to ask, before they, too, were also lost to time.  
  
“That night after work, I brought home fruit from the market.”  
  
“So ripe they were near bursting.”  
  
“I only wish I’d been there to see you make it that first time.”  
  
“And ruin the surprise and deprive me of peaches? For shame! It was much simpler then, just flour and water, mixed in a bowl, then kneaded and rolled into a sheet, and cut into strings and boiled," Joe explained. "I had my sleeves rolled, and they were soaking with sweat. You didn’t miss much.”  
  
“I beg to differ.”  
  
“Then beg,” Joe teased.  
  
Nile pictured Joe getting home early to surprise Nicky, and kneading the dough with firm but gentle artist’s hands. She felt a sudden wave of melancholy and wondered if she’d ever experience anything like that again, coming home to a loved one expressing their love through food. Not just a lover, but also family: between tours, coming home to her mother making dinner or her brother at the grill, the whole house smelling of chipotle pot roast, cornbread, and mesquite smoke.  
  
“He’d served it with _agliata_ , a Ligurian garlic sauce made with walnuts and and olive oil, usually used for meat dating back to Ancient Rome. He said it symbolized the intertwining of our two cultures into something greater."

Nile imagined Joe crushing walnuts with a mortar and pestle like she’d seen people make pesto. Or did he crush them under a bowl, or between two towels with a rolling pin? No, people had mortars and pestles then, right? 

"I was so deeply touched that I. . .” Nicky trailed off, and shared a knowing look with Joe, who somehow looked earnestly sentimental _and_ like he was holding back from saying something about being “deeply touched,” at the same time.  
  
“Our neighbors smelled it, and naturally wanted to know what Joe had made for dinner. We’d had a discussion about whether we wanted to keep it our secret, just for ourselves, or share it with others. We decided on the latter. We told everyone we knew the recipe, and word traveled fast. It was our way of sharing our love publicly with the world.”  
  
Nile imagined Yusuf, bright, easy to laugh, personable, and always 15 languages ahead of Nicolò, eager to invite others to partake in this expression of his love, and Nicolò, quietly observant, kind and soft-spoken, but more than capable of being cold and calculating, and more private with his affections, wanting to keep this gift from Yusuf for himself.

“When your home exists only in history, you rebuild that home in a language, food, or in a person,” Joe said thoughtfully. **“** But you also change the beams as needed, and make it larger so others can come in.”

Nile sat contemplating this as Joe took out the dough, rolled it out, and laminated it before rolling it into a thin sheet. Was this their way of extending an invitation into their home and family? Maybe she _would_ experience coming home to someone she loved cooking again.

Joe artfully arranged choice herb leaves on a long sheet of pasta, then placed a second sheet on top, before rolling the sheets together. Nile watched how the leaves seemed to shatter like glass as the pasta stretched. Nile didn’t know whether this was a traditional recipe or a modern preparation, or neither, something based on all his experiences cooking from his extensive travels, but it certainly looked very Instagrammable. As Joe folded and cut the pasta, Nicky worked on the sauce, which looked suspiciously green (and that should have been her first clue). Andy popped in occasionally to stick her finger in and demand more garlic.

* * *

It wasn’t until a few days later, when Nicky was whistling “Non sono una signora” while making a modified _malloreddus alla campidanese_ with Joe, that Nile realized that she’d been had.

Nile took out their laptop and made quick work opening up tab after tab with sites, articles, and books about pasta, Sicily, the Maghreb, and Tunisia, wondering if this was what her life would have been like had she been able to study art history in college after leaving the Marines like she’d planned. Nile had gathered that the Imazighen had occupied Sicily for two hundred years before the Normans, and they were mostly traders like Yusuf’s family. Judging by Sicily’s proximity to Tunisia, it’s entirely possible that _itriyya_ made its way to Sicily much earlier than recorded.

“Those _bastards!_ ”

She should have seen it coming, Joe and Nicky did occasionally bend the truth in favor of a better story (“I leaned in close to his ear and whispered, ‘ _Far de mi quel che voler. Non tenir honta. . . . Ou ti lasciar cunciar per mi_ ,’ and he _melted_ ,” Joe had fondly recalled in his best Harlequin Romance voice. “Don’t listen to this man’s lies, Nile,” Nicky had interjected without looking up from his book. “That never happened. We never even _used_ _Sabir_ because Yusuf already spoke _zeneise!_ ”).

Andy walked by and glanced at Nile’s laptop screen. She threw her head back and laughed like an actress in the old movies that would play after Antiques Roadshow, albeit less elegantly.

“Ha! Did they tell you they brought coffee to Europe, too?”

Nile glanced over at them with a raised eyebrow, and they beamed.

“Technically, the recipes Nicky knows how to cook predate Italy. And we don’t believe in borders because more often than not, they cross us, not the other way around. I did introduce Nicky to _itriyya_ , and that particular preparation was entirely my invention, well, we _think_ , and it did get hugely popular with the locals. It wasn’t just one person who brought pasta to Italy, you see, but many people over a period of time, and we like to think that we were part of that history.”

History is told by victors, or in this case, the immortals to their captive audience of younger immortals sworn to secrecy, with no impact on the field at large. In that moment, Nile felt what must have been only a small fraction of the exasperation Booker, fifth wheeling in a four person group, experienced over 200 years, and almost thought that maybe he’d had a point.

Almost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Sabir:**  
>  _Far de mi quel che voler. Non tenir honta. . . . Ou ti lasciar cunciar per mi_ : Do what you want with me. Don't be ashamed. . . . Or let me do it  
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> I wrote it while really sick so I’m very sorry if the ending felt rushed!
> 
> Also, I cut out a pun involving at least 4 languages because I’m a coward.

**Author's Note:**

> I made three batches of fresh pasta at 5am the night after starting this and hurt my arms and got banned from making pasta for two weeks.
> 
> Reblog it on [Tumblr](https://itsrottenvibes.tumblr.com/post/628575350473015296/) if you feel so inclined!


End file.
